


throw away the empty heart

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-20
Updated: 2017-04-20
Packaged: 2018-10-21 05:13:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10678404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: They’re both hurting due to the same tragedy, but not for entirely the same reasons.





	throw away the empty heart

**Author's Note:**

> **MAJOR spoilers for 4x18 "No Regrets"** and speculation for 4x19. (But these things won't happen, that's why I write fic.) 
> 
> Title from Nine Lashes' "Anthem of the Lonely."

Sound streams in when the door opens. Children are running around out there. Mack’s daughter laughs when he threatens to come after her if she doesn’t brush her teeth _right this instant_.

He was telling her to do her homework when Jemma last saw them. How long has she been sitting here?

The door shuts, completely blocking out the euphoric sounds. The man who entered doesn’t speak, but then he doesn’t need to. Ward is the only person on base who would come to see her.

He drops a beer gently on the floor in front of her and then settles beside her with a bottle of his own.

“Misery loves company?” she asks. Her muscles protest when she reaches to take the drink. Her back’s gone numb from being curled up against the concrete and brick for so long. It couldn’t be helped however, as the base doesn’t have enough electricity to open up the private quarters and Jemma’s cot comes with nearly a dozen roommates. Carefully constructed arrangements of ones and zeroes they may be, but their pitying looks would have felt real enough.

“You’re falling behind,” Ward says.

She takes a long draught before answering and sounds somewhat breathless as a result. “I didn’t know it was a competition.”

“’S not.”

She smiles, despite herself. He is - as much as he can be when everything about him is a lie - _very_ drunk.

“But tonight’s it. Tomorrow it’s back to work.” He taps the neck of his bottle to hers. “So drink up because there’s no getting slobbering drunk over them after this.” There’s a hard edge to that last bit that she imagines is more for himself than for her.

He isn’t Ward. She’s known that from the beginning but it wasn’t until he apologized - and for actions he had no part in - that it really hit home for her. Whoever - _what_ ever - the man beside her is, he isn’t a monster. He is, from all she’s seen here, a good and decent person. Precisely the sort of person she thought-

She takes another drink to better swallow down a sob.

He spreads his legs out on the floor ahead of him. They make a wide V that gives the impression he won’t be moving from his spot for some time. Another thing that is wholly unlike the real Ward: he never would have allowed himself to be put at such a tactical disadvantage.

“You wanna talk about it?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “That wouldn’t be fair.” They’re both hurting due to the same tragedy, but not for entirely the same reasons.

He sighs heavily. “I talked to Antoine. Drank him under the table. Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it, right?”

“It’s not the same-” she tries.

“Yeah, but it’ll make you feel better.”

Lord, and that is precisely the _least_ Ward thing he could have said. She blinks fiercely to stop herself crying outright. “I was just thinking,” she says carefully, “that this is the third time this has happened.”

“The doctor killed a lot of people where you’re from?”

She’s too emotionally drained and bone-tired to do so much as flinch, but Ward reacts as though she had.

“I’m sorry.” He opens his hands, palms up, as if to show her he has no excuse. “I’m a dick. But you knew that.”

“No,” she says because she doesn’t. He’s not the man she knew. And he isn’t the only one.

She breathes deeply through the knife of pain that thought leaves in her lungs and attempts to reorient her thoughts. “This is the third time a man I’ve loved has turned into a monster.”

Ward allows her the dignity of a beat of silence before muttering, “Wow.”

“Will wasn’t- He died. And his body was possessed by the creature that killed him, so it’s hardly the same thing, but…” It feels like it. She was almost grateful after they discovered Hive had returned because at least he was in Ward’s body, at least she would never have to face the man she loved while that _thing_  sat behind his eyes. But then he cornered her in that hallway in Bucharest and though he was in Ward’s body his words, his voice, even the way he touched her, were all so very Will.

And now Fitz has been brainwashed by the Framework and by Aida. Jemma was afraid she’d lost him when he killed Agnes - how could he face himself after doing such a thing? - but now … Now she wonders how she can bring him back.

“I’m sorry,” she says. For some reason she’s keenly aware of the bottle in her hand when she says it, of the curvature of the glass and the condensation pooling against her hand. It’s all so lifelike. “If I hadn’t stopped you, Daisy would be alive.” Her voice cracks. She takes another drink as the first tears break free.

She’s been sitting in this dark room for hours but she hasn’t cried, not once. All this time, all she could do was replay that moment over and over, break her own heart against the memory again and again in hopes that this time it might hurt less.

Daisy was _so close_ to freedom, she and May both, and Jemma knew that soon they would all be free of not only HYDRA but this entire, horrible place. But then Daisy’s eyes widened, her hand flew up. Jemma turned in time to see the agents with their guns leveled at her and the others before the men were thrown off their feet. When Jemma turned back, a breathless thanks half-formed on her tongue, she saw Fitz. He was alone, his face contorted in a fury Jemma had never seen from him, and he had a gun in his hand.

Two shots. She thinks she can still hear them echoing in her ears. They were all it took to kill Jemma’s best friend.

And Jemma hates herself. Because it’s her fault for not allowing Ward to stop Fitz on the island. But more because her grief has been as much for Daisy’s killer as for Daisy herself. Fitz might have been able to recover from killing Agnes - she couldn’t have been saved from this place and Fitz never knew her personally - but Daisy? If Fitz returns to the real world and his memories of who Daisy was to him, he will not be able to live with himself. And Jemma’s afraid she means that quite literally.

She can’t save him. She doesn’t know she can save Coulson either - he loves Daisy like a _daughter_ , can she really free him just so he can feel that anguish? And that of course leads to the question of whether she can take this life from Mack, assuming she can even convince him his daughter is a lie. Mace is dead already, and May … Jemma doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what sort of person this world has turned May into.

So that’s it. She can - potentially - save May. But the rest? Even if she can find a way out, she’ll only be condemning them to far worse than this world.

“Who’s the other guy?”

Jemma was so lost in her thoughts, she forgot about Ward completely. He regards her with a look of casual interest, no calculation, no malice, no manipulation.

“What?” she asks, wiping at her cheeks. She thinks he means who else was there when Daisy was killed, but Fitz was quite alone when it happened. His reinforcements only arrived after. Unless she missed someone.

“You said there were three guys you’d loved. Who’s the other one?”

Her breath catches in her throat. There is no possible way she can answer that.

“Oh,” he says after a moment. “That explains a lot.” He takes another drink.

“It wasn’t-” She sighs. “We weren’t _in love_. It was a crush. And I got over it after you betrayed us.”

He chuckles in a way that reminds her entirely too much of the real Ward. “Right.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” He shakes his head. He smiles, but it’s a sad, wobbly sort of thing that can’t at all manage to get around the heartbreak written in every line of him. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

It quite obviously does and he’s still staring. She wants to defend herself, to explain each and every one of the million good reasons she had for falling out of love with Grant Ward. But he thinks he _is_ Grant Ward and, as she’s already established this man beside her is far better than the real Ward ever was, she won’t shame him with those crimes.

“I’m-” He stops himself. His eyes are slightly glassy and his pupils too wide even for the dim lights in here.

“You’re?” she asks while debating whether she’d be better off leaving him to sleep it off on the floor or helping him to his feet.

He swallows thickly and makes an aborted motion with his bottle. “Fuck it,” he breathes. The nearly empty bottle makes a high-pitched clatter against the concrete, freeing his hands to cup her face while he kisses her.

Her first instinct is to push him away, but her own bottle gets in the way of that and by the time she manages to set it aside without spilling its contents all over the both of them, shock has given way to pleasure.

It’s been days - from her perspective; there’s no telling how time is passing in the real world - since Fitz last held her. Longer still since the _real_ Fitz did so. In that time she’s been beaten, stabbed, kidnapped, had to claw her way out of a mass grave, and endured one emotional blow after another. She wants to be held - she _needs_ to be held - and it doesn’t matter who’s doing it.

She melts into him, allows herself to simply feel and not think at all for the first time in what feels less like days and more like years.

All too soon, his hands stop holding her to him and begin pushing her back.

“Sorry,” he gasps when they break apart. There’s not much space between them - somehow she’s come to be straddling his legs - but his hands are firm on her shoulders, holding her at a distance. He shakes his head once, keeping his eyes shut. “That was … wrong. And stupid and rude and … grief. It was grief and I’m sor-” He cuts off with a strangled sort of sound when her fingers brush his cheek.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t apologize.”

His eyes open, something like a plea in them. “You just said I was a monster.”

She shakes her head slowly while she slides her fingertips along his cheekbone. She can still remember so clearly that morning in Providence. Checking him over, firmly pushing down her quivering fear that he’d have been hurt more badly than he was. “You’re not him.”

That plea turns to relief. “You believe-”

“I believe you,” she says quickly, not wanting to get into the specifics. “You said that if we feel it, that makes it real. I’d like to feel something that isn’t … this.” This pain, this grief, this helplessness. She felt this before, on Maveth. Perhaps coping the same way she did there won’t be entirely healthy given the situation now, but it worked for her then. It’s worth another shot now. 

“What about … him?”

That knife in her lungs digs a little deeper. She bites her lip against it. She can’t say what she’s thinking: that she’s terrified the HYDRA doctor the whole world fears is no more the Fitz she loves than this man is the Ward she hates. Instead she turns away.

A rough palm cups her cheek, forcing her to meet dark eyes. “You’re drunk and hurting and as much as I’d like to feel something else too, I don’t want to take advantage of you.”

She fights down a smile. She’s barely drunk half a beer, she's barely even buzzed. And if anything, in this situation she’s the one taking advantage of him. “You won’t be.”

“Simmons-”

She presses forward until her hips rest over his. “You won’t be.”

He breathes out through his teeth. For a moment she thinks she has him, but when his hands land on her hips it’s to lift her away, not pull her closer. He deposits her on the floor and stands to walk away. She’s just in the middle of thinking the real Ward would never have removed himself from temptation so completely when she hears the click of a lock.

“There are kids out there,” he says, voice gone rough, and stalks back to her. Despite the circumstances that led them here, she laughs as he gently eases her down to the floor. She’ll take what joy she can in this place and make it real.

 


End file.
